Missions accomplished today: 1. Picked up the antique filing cabinet shipped from Denver at Pacific Alaska Forwarders, unpacked it, and set it up in Dad’s office. 2. Retrieved Dad’s Audi from storage at Classic Motion. 3. Unpacked and connected new dvd player as well as old speakers to the downstairs tv. 4. Installed Panther on Mom’s computer. 5. Hung the first of many prints and maps that need to be put up all over the house. 6. Talked a big game about how Dad is going to get all his “stuff” (mostly in the form of paper and brass) off the floor of his office and reclaim the space.
Not bad for the first day. The reason I’m checking these thing off is that my reason for visiting is not only to see the family and get a little vacation, but to help out Dad, currently operating with one good and one not-so-good arm as he recovers from shoulder surgery. Mom leaves tomorrow for her trip to Utah, and is currently loading her carry-on with all the quarters she can find in preparation for a whirlwind evening in Vegas tomorrow night before heading to St. Joseph for some hiking and stuff. Nickel slots all the way!
This is the first time I’ve been in the house since the Year of Renovations (2003), and the changes are all around. My room has been redone, which I had seen before but hadn’t slept in yet. It’s strange, to sleep pointing east-west in a murphy bed where I used to face north, out the window facing Denali, in the top bunk of a bunk-bed. My room looks about as much like it did when I lived here as Scott’s room has for years now. They both look like offices. I guess that’s what happens. The bathroom has been spruced up, with the Finnur-hole in the wall (and its garbage bag/duct tape cover) now gone, thanks to new tiling, a new window, and a cool ledge for products. Yes, products.
The living room view is even more tremendous now thanks to a big window where the stove used to be, but it sort of loses points when you look at the replacement stove with its fake logs. The carpet here, as well in in the first and third floors, is all new and stiff, like in someone else’s house. The place still sounds the same, though, with tell-tale creaks and plumbing noises and ticking clocks, as well as the sounds we all make when we travel through the house, stepping on steps, flipping light switches, running water, opening the fridge. The sounds are the most memorable part of the house, to me, and they haven’t changed much.
Mom got me a week’s membership to the Alaska Club, so I went for a run there this afternoon and worked out a little on some of their weird machines. We went to Bear Tooth for dinner, which was pretty packed. Saw Marne from elementary school there, and had some great halibut chowder and a fine Moose’s Tooth Pale Ale.
I went to Video City this afternoon, and was once again amazed at the way that place is a video time capsule. I looked on their printed list of titles, which was probably printed in 1990, and they listed a lot of strange, obscure things like Billy Wilder’s Buddy Buddy and Americathon, starring John Ritter, that I’d been looking for for awhile. Unfortunately, I bet no one had rented Americathon in about fifteen years, so it seems they’d probably gotten rid of it long ago, but they had Buddy Buddy, as well as a bunch of other obscure Sinatra films I’d been looking for as well. Their video collection, as opposed to their dvd collection, is massive, and features the biggest number of films I’ve absolutely never heard of, all with faded cardboard covers, cut out and shoved haphazardly into white plastic boxes. Movies whose stars wish they wouldn’t be made available to the public, movies whose cover designs look a lot like the cover of Swingers or Animal House, but aren’t… These are movies that will probably never come to dvd, and Video City is, for whatever reason – remoteness, ample square-footage, lack of energy – keeping them in stock, keeping the torch of movies made prior to 1995 burning bright.
I’m glad we got the dvd player installed; now dad and I can watch The Ox-Bow Incident, his first dvd. He’s been telling us about that film since I started studying film at school ten years ago, and I hadn’t seen it. Every time he asked me about it, I said to myself I’d never see it, but somewhere along the line, it became a joke, to the point where I wanted to see it because we’d talked about it so much, but I we never got around to it. When I heard he’d gotten a dvd player, I thought it’d be an appropriate first disc. The new dvd player has brought the family room into the 21st century, though the VCR I still remember buying from Magnum Electronics (“where quality – qual-i-teee… – is a way of life!”) that night in 1984 brings down the modernity level somewhat. Still works, though.
